No abstract

Flood protection is one of several disciplines where geospatial data is very important and is a crucial component. Its management, processing and sharing form the foundation for their efficient use; therefore, special attention is required in the development of effective, precise, standardized, and interoperable models for the discovery and publishing of data on the Web. This paper describes the design of a methodology to discover Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) services on the Web and collect descriptive information, i.e., metadata in a geocatalogue. A pilot implementation of the proposed methodology -Geocatalogue of geospatial information provided by OGC services discovered on Google (hereinafter "Geocatalogue") -was used to search for available resources relevant to the area of flood protection. The result is an analysis of the availability of resources discovered through their metadata collected from the OGC services (WMS, WFS, etc.) and the resources they provide (WMS layers, WFS objects, etc.) within the domain of flood protection.

Spatial data have become very important phenomena within the last decade in Europe due to a strong support from the political spectrum with regard to related legislation and resulting in financial support to several research, educational, and enlargement projects. INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community) Directive indeed defines the principles for the harmonization of spatial data infrastructure in the European community, including Land Use and Land Cover data themes. INSPIRE defines a methodology on how to transform datasets to common data models, but it does not cover the process of data collection and update, because it is out of its scope. Evaluation of the Land Use dataset derived from remote sensing products complemented by fieldworks has been realized since 2006 by Eurostat within the LUCAS (Land Use and Cover Area frame Survey) project. The work presented in this paper follows the LUCAS fieldwork methodology, which was applied during the fieldwork in July 2014 in the City of Zagreb (Croatia), to use at the local (municipal) geoportal level. The surveying groups collected point features with the following data type attributes: Land Use codes defined by HILUCS (Hierarchical INSPIRE Land Use Classification System) and optional Land Cover codes defined by LUCAS classification. In addition, photographs representing the observed areas were collected by cameras embedded in the mobile GIS platforms. An update of original topological layer was performed and Web GIS components for sharing the newly developed datasets were implemented. The results presented provide a suitable proposal for fieldworks methodology and updates of a land use database in line with the INSPIRE directive applicable at a local spatial data infrastructure level.

Methodology for conformance testing of spatial data infrastructure components including an example of its implementation in SlovakiaBefore any spatial data infrastructure (SDI) is implemented as fully operational, many relevant testing procedures should take place. Such procedures should evaluate the compliancy level of particular SDI components against the relevant standards and implementing rules. Hence, they should ensure a high interoperability level. Many testing activities have already been performed within the implementation of the European SDI (INSPIRE - Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community). Nevertheless, a common and versatile testing methodology, which is possible to use at any level of SDI realization is still lacking. This paper proposes a conformance testing methodology for selected SDI components applicable via network services for the discovery, view and downloading of data. An example of such an implementation has taken place within an environmental SDI developed by the Slovak Environmental Agency. A testing report template summarizing the results of the tests is proposed to be considered as a common template on a national level to be used within the implementation of a National Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the Slovak Republic.

The effective access to and reuse of geospatial information (GI) has come to be of critical value in modern knowledge based society. The standardized web services defined by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) are frequently used for the implementation of a spatial data infrastructure (SDI), to expose geospatial data, metadata and models on the Web. These GI are normally stored in an encoded geospatial layer, which is hidden from search engines. SDI uses a catalogue service for the web as a gateway to GI through the metadata defined by ISO standards, which are structurally diverse to OGC metadata. Therefore, a crosswalk needs to be implemented to bridge the OGC resources discovered on mainstream web with those documented by metadata in an SDI to enrich its information extent. We have to build mechanisms allowing entrepreneurs and developers access the information SDI is providing to build their apps. The paper reports a global wide and user friendly platform of OGC resources available on the web with the main goal to ensure and enhance the use of GI within a multidisciplinary context and to bridge the geospatial web from the end-user perspective, thus to open its borders to more web communities. The platform has been developed in the research project Borderless Geospatial Web (Bolegweb).